Is it possible to make eggs with a None zip-safe flag default to being instaleld zipped with Distribute?

Our large python project is being upgraded from using the legacy "setuptools" project to use "distribute" as a drop-in replacement.

We've noticed one problematic difference between the two applications: In setuptools an egg which had an undefined zip-safe flag was assumed to be zip-safe and would install as a zipped file (unless the user explicitly specifies not to).

By comparison with the new Distribute all eggs are assumed to be not zip safe (and will install unzipped) unless they have the zip-safe flag set to be explictly True.

As a consequence eggs which would previously have been installed simply by copying the .egg file to the site-packages are now unzipped to site-packages. Ideally, I'd like the new distribute to install eggs in a manner which is exactly consistent with th开发者_Python百科e older setuptools.

It may sound like an inconsequential thing, however if we change something as fundamental as the directory structure of the site-packages folder it will force our team to go through a phase of international UAT which will be very time-consuming. It would be far better if we could simply guarantee that the new installer produces the exact same directory structure as the old one.

FYI, I'm using the very latest distribute on Python 2.4.4 for Windows XP 32bit.

If you're using Python 2.4 on Windows, there aren't any advantages to using Distribute over Setuptools. Distribute only offers a comparative advantage on Python 2.6 (where it supports the new "home" directory layout) and Python 3.x (which setuptools hasn't been ported to).

Apart from that, there aren't really any "upgrades" in Distribute, relative to setuptools; in fact, Distribute still contains bugs that have either been fixed in setuptools, or that never existed in setuptools (because they were added in Distribute).

You should also be aware that the people who created Distribute are now mainly working on Distutils2, and are NOT planning any significant improvements to Distribute.

I realize this might not be the answer you're looking for, since apparently you've already decided to switch. However, if you switched purely on the basis of the popular rumor that setuptools isn't maintained or has bugs that Distribute fixes (which is actually the other way around), you might want to reconsider.